Cross-Cultural Experiences of Infant Signing (CCEIS)

Together with researchers from the U.K., France, China, Chile, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Japan we are studying the choices and experiences of parents who use Infant Signs with their children. This is an online survey of parents in each of these countries (and others) intended to inform us about cultural differences – and universalities – in parenting attitudes and motivations for using this parenting tool, and cultural similarities and differences in children’s learning and use of culturally conventional gestures and infant signs.

We finished collecting data for the CCEIS project via an online survey in the summer of 2011. This map represents the areas of the world in which the participating families live.

We are currently translating the open-ended responses and conducting preliminary analyses of the numeric data. Preliminary results comparing the responses of parents from 4 countries (U.S., Chile, France, and Germany) reveal that all parents use signs in order to promote bidirectional communication with their young children. Parents in Chile are more motivated than those in other countries to improve their child’s politeness and to make them proud of their child, and less motivated by promoting their child’s independence. Parents in the US are more motivated to increase their child’s compliance. Parents in France are least motivated to use signs to improve their child’s politeness and most motivated to increase their child’s self-regulation.

We plan to present preliminary results from all 8 countries at conferences in summer 2012. Visit this page again soon to learn what we else we found!